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he essence of Team Obama's reelection strategy was to capitalize on their man's strength with what National Journal's Ron Brownstein calls "the coalition of the ascendant" has long been clear. Back in May, I wrote a cover story for the magazine laying out Chicago's plan to focus laser-like on four key voting blocs: African-Americans, Hispanics, college-educated white women, and voters of all ethnicities aged 18-29. At bottom, their theory of the case was that, despite the fragility of the recovery and the doubts that many voters had about Obama's capacity to put America firmly back on the road to prosperity, the deft and aggressive exploitation of coalition politics (along with the ruthless disqualification of Romney as a credible occupant of the Oval Office) could secure the president a second term. That in 2012, in other words, demographics would trump economics.

A quick glance at the exit polls confirms the extent to which the coalition of the ascendant is responsible for that performance. Contrary to the assumptions of the Romney campaign, the electorate that turned out on Tuesday was more diverse than 2008's, not less. Nationally, the share of the vote comprised by whites fell from 74 to 72 percent, while the black vote held steady at 13 and rose among Hispanics from 9 to 10, among Asians from 2.5 to 3 percent, among women from 53 to 54 percent, and among young voters from 18 to 19 percent. Obama's share of each of those blocs was overwhelming: 93 percent of African-Americans, 71 percent of Latinos, 73 percent of Asians, 55 percent of the ladies, and 60 percent of the kids. T

the challenges facing the Republican Party are far greater and far graver; indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that they are existential. Before Election Day, there were some in GOP yakkety-yakosphere who were warming up to pin the blame for Romney's impending defeat on Hurricane Sandy, a dubious proposition rendered utterly absurd by what happened yesterday. Not only was the problem not Sandy — it wasn't even simply Romney. True, the weaknesses of the Republican nominee were manifold and glaring, but they had nothing to do with the party's having squandered its chance to take back control of the Senate by pissing away two eminently winnable seats (in Missouri and Indiana) by dint of having nominated abject cretins (Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock). Or with the passage, for the first time, of ballot initiatives in two states (Maine and Maryland) legalizing same-sex marriage, and the legalizing of marijuana in two others (Colorado and Washington).

Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.

“If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done

Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.

In the end, Mitt Romney didn’t lose the Michigan primary, and he didn’t lose his near-lock on the Republican nomination. Rick Santorum isn’t going away, but a solid victory in Michigan and an easy win in Arizona leaves the Romney campaign’s basic math more or less intact. If their candidate can keep winning contests in the West and Northeast and holding serve across the Midwest, Romney’s rivals won’t be able to stop him from grinding out a victory.

But the frontrunner did lose something in the days leading up to the Michigan vote. He lost his general election narrative.

From the very first debates onward, Romney has spent the primary campaign walking a fine line — trying to assuage widespread right-wing doubts about his ideological reliability, while crafting a persona and a policy portfolio that will appeal to moderates as well as conservatives come November.

Women have been at the forefront of protests against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, whose claim of victory in an August election is widely disputed. Holding flowers and flags, they gather weekly, risking arrest, harassment and beating by security forces.

The protests began after Belarus' disputed Aug. 9 reelection. Lukhashenko, who has been in power since 1994, claimed victory over Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of a jailed opposition figure.

"It's like at that time you realize that you are there not because you did something, not because you committed a crime. You are there because you are fighting for freedom. And the spirit of people, I mean, I was so amazed," Leuchanka said.

It now seems a near-certainty that he will (and should) name a black woman as his vice presidential running mate.

Floyd's death has sparked (mostly) peaceful protests around the country, not just about police brutality but also about the deep and abiding racial inequalities present in American society.

the former vice president said

“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said. “I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.”

sometimes the point is just to get people to look up.

The problem with politicians who abuse power isn’t that they don’t get results. It’s that the results come at a high cost to the Republic — and to the reputations of those who lack the courage or wisdom to resist.

During Mr. Obama’s first term, MSNBC underwent a metamorphosis from a CNN also-ran to the anti-Fox, and handily beat CNN in the ratings along the way. Now that it is known, at least to those who cannot get enough politics, as the nation’s liberal television network, the challenge in the next four years will be to capitalize on that identity.

MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC. But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.

MSNBC sees itself as the voice of Mr. Obama’s America.

we’ve had everything from jeans commercials to rock anthems to political conventions celebrating freedom as the highest ideal.

People are much more at liberty these days to follow their desires, unhampered by social convention, religious and ethnic traditions and legal restraints.

big thinkers down through the ages warned us this was going to have downsides. Alexis de Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim thought that if people are left perfectly free to pursue their individual desires, they will discover their desires are unlimited and unquenchable. They’ll turn inward and become self-absorbed. Society will become atomized. You’ll end up with more loneliness and less community.

The theory that the moon landings were hoaxed by the US government to assert their victory in the space race over Russia, is something which has grown in popularity over time.

t I have to admit that the campaign has made my decision easier. The conservative media is broken and the conservative movement deeply compromised.

Before this year, I thought I had a relatively solid grasp on what conservatism stood for and where it was going

I was under the impression that conservatives actually believed things about free trade, balanced budgets, character and respect for constitutional rights. Then along came this campaign.

The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.”

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”

As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!”

Turner and other elite students are living the American Dream. Parents raise them in a world of winners and losers, victory and defeat, and expect them to be victors

They mythologize this behavior as natural order. From “boys will be boys” to “he was a born champion,” young men like Brock Turner are taught that they should aspire to be talented, successful winners.

for every conqueror, there must be conquered. We don’t say that someone simply won a game, they demolished their competition. A young man doesn’t just “have sex” with a woman, he “scores” or “smashes.” There are no ties, and there is no second place.

The oft-repeated claim that we must all learn Mandarin Chinese, the better to trade with our future masters, is one that readers of David Moser’s “A Billion Voices” will rapidly end up re-evaluating.

In fact, many Chinese don’t speak it: Even Chinese authorities quietly admit that only about 70% of the population speaks Mandarin, and merely one in 10 of those speak it fluently.

Mr. Moser presents a history of what is more properly called Putonghua, or “common speech,” along with a clear, concise and often amusing introduction to the limits of its spoken and written forms.

During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.

the twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist—praising famous men and celebrating famous victories—or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering.

The problem with this lapidary representation of the last century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now, thankfully, emerged is not the description—it was in many ways a truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance—unencumbered by past errors—into a different and better era.

Rick should scat. Mitt Romney needs to be left alone to limp across the finish line, so he can devote his full time and attention to losing to President Obama.

Robo-Romney, who pulled out victories in his home state and in Arizona, and Sanctorum are still in a race to the bottom.

In the old days, the Republican ego had control of the party’s id. The id, sometimes described as a galloping horse or crying baby, “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality ... chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations,” as Freud called it, was whipped up obliquely by candidates. Nixon had his Southern strategy of using race as a wedge, Bush Senior and Lee Atwater used the Willie Horton attack, and W. and Karl Rove conjured the gay marriage bogyman.